Critical Design Reseach

Ideation: Unconventional Areas of Adornment

Jewelry is meant to adorn and make thing more beautiful to look at and attractive. It can enhance the appearance of certain part of the body and distract away from other ‘undesirable’ areas one may want to put out of focus. With this concept, I wanted to adorn parts of the body which may seem weird to highlight and wear jewelry on.

Knuckles are a strange oddity to me. They create uniformed valleys on your hands and are really just strange things to look at or appreciate. In the sketch to the right, I have designed a ring that fills in the negative spaces of the knuckle valleys. It loops around the back of the knuckle creating a U-channel which isolates one knuckle from the bunch which gives it more attention.

The concept of wearing jewelry to bring attention and ornament undesirable and unconventional areas of the body visually creates forms and shapes which make sense when applied to the body, but seem abstract and unrelated when they are purely viewed as objects. This shift way culture thinks and interacts with bracelets/ jewelry. Jewelry typically takes the form of a generic size and ringed shaped from which people can very easily connect to its intended placement on the body. Unconventional areas paired with unconventional forms challenge the wear with how they should go about wearing this specific jewelry piece. It shifts the way people think about jewelry in that it introduces the practice of adorning the body in what people define as unattractive parts of the body.